


The Case of A Thousand Cranes

by Kansas42



Series: More Green String Than Red [1]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Angst, Banshee Lydia Martin, Canonical Character Death, Case Fic, Depression, Detective Stiles, Dreams, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Nogitsune Trauma, Post-it Notes, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide Attempt, post 3b
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-01
Updated: 2014-06-11
Packaged: 2018-01-27 20:39:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 12,113
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1721840
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kansas42/pseuds/Kansas42
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>This is something different, this . . . case . . . they’re working on. Stiles would call it the ‘B’ plot, or the monster of the week. Lydia thinks of it as redemption. It’s something they need to earn for themselves, by themselves</i>.</p><p>In the wake of Allison's death, Lydia and Stiles try to pick up the pieces.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. the (screaming) queen of all creation

**Author's Note:**

> Originally, I conceived this as a short, maybe couple thousand word story, mostly exploring Lydia's awesome abilities. I wanted to write something where she got her banshee groove on. I was thinking, you know, a string of some (hopefully pretty) vignettes.
> 
> Then . . . it grew.

She dreams of Allison again. 

They’re in Lydia’s bedroom, trying on clothes, but every dress Allison slips into grows red and wet. “Your fashion sensibilities are tragic,” Lydia tells her, but whatever Allison says back is lost to the sound of piano keys, hesitant fingers, awkwardly tapping out the “Fur Elise.” Lydia’s been hearing it for days.

Allison is still trying to say something. Her mouth moves, forming the same words over and over. 

S . . . me. 

. . . ave me.

_Save me_.

But Lydia’s too late for that. And when she wakes up, the “Fur Elise” still pounding in her ears, she knows there’s another person out there. Someone else she’s too late to save.

#

She gets dressed -- quickly, but not in the first clothes she sees. That first skirt is hideous, a gift from her literally colorblind grandmother, and the equally atrocious dress next to it – yet another gift she hasn’t had time to return -- is bright yellow and covered in obnoxiously cute kittens. She should burn it. It is, at the very least, hardly appropriate attire for finding dead bodies in the middle of the night.

The dress she puts on instead is red. It should make her feel powerful. (It doesn’t.)

She doesn’t bother to grab her keys. She won’t have to walk far -- the music guides her down the street, the piano keys only growing more and more insistent as she approaches the park. She has to cover her ears, like a fearful child. The body is in the playground, slumped over in one of the rickety swings.

It’s a boy, a teenager -- fourteen, maybe, or fifteen. She doesn’t know him. His feet are bare and his lips are blue, and his eyes are fixed and set on the see-saw a few feet away. 

Lydia turns away and pulls out her phone.

He answers on the first ring. There’s exhaustion in his voice, but no confusion, no grit to suggest that he’d been asleep. “Lydia? What’s wrong?”

There are too many answers to that question. “I’m at the park.”

“I’m coming.”

“Stiles.” She takes a breath, and he waits for her. He’s terrible at waiting, but he always, always waits for her. “I wanted to get here in time.”

“It’s okay,” he tells her. (It’s not.)

#

Stiles looks at the body for a while, hunching right down next to it. It might be pathological, his need to peer at dead things. Eventually, he gets up, calls his dad, and gives Lydia a ride home. They can’t be there when the body’s found -- not officially found, anyway. The Sheriff already has too many awkward questions he’s still trying to answer about Stiles and disappearances and dead bodies.

Lydia still doesn’t know what happened to Stiles. She knows the barebones, of course, but not the specifics -- not what dreams chased him into a coyote den, not where he goes when he sleeps (if he sleeps) now. Maybe nobody has the whole story. Maybe everyone’s too afraid to ask. 

Stiles parks his Jeep in front of her house, and he is eerily pale under the light of the half moon. The dark bruises under his eyes make him look like an abused child. 

“It’s not your fault,” Stiles says, holding her hand.

She pulls away, roughly.

“I’ll believe that when you do,” she says, and slams the door behind her.

#

Gifted. That’s the word all her teachers have used, ever since she first set foot in school, a little girl in a pink dress who was always and forever being underestimated. A boy in class told her that girls weren’t any good at math, especially pretty girls like her. Another pretty girl’s mother caught her reading at a slumber party and told her to leave the big books for the big kids who could understand them. It infuriated her at first, all these demeaning expectations -- but Lydia learned to use those expectations to her own advantage, to bat her eyelashes and smile sweetly and wrap students and teachers alike around her finger. She would rule this school as queen without anyone being the wiser, without anyone knowing what she was truly capable of. She would excel, and did excel, and _does_ excel at everything she puts her hand to. 

Everything but this.

Lydia goes two days without hearing anything out of the ordinary; then she’s at school, and every step she takes makes a splash, like the hallways are flooded. (They’re not.) _Someone is going to drown_ , she thinks. She will be too late to save them.

She is tired of being too late. There has to be something she can do.

She analyzes the problem. There is only one logical conclusion, and it involves driving first to the crafts store and then to Stiles’s house. He didn’t go to school today. He doesn’t go to school a lot. The Sheriff lets her inside with a polite hello and a kind, weary smile.

He offers to make her something to eat. Lydia refuses until she realizes that he’s not trying to cook for her, not really. This is how she ends up carrying a plate of lukewarm Bagel Bites that she normally wouldn’t be caught dead eating.

Outside the door, Lydia raises her hand to knock, then hesitates. She can hear Stiles through the wall. He’s talking to somebody -- although on the phone, or in his head, she’s not sure. “A hole,” Stiles says. “A coffin . . . a shadow . . . a secret.” It’s like a grocery list for the macabre. A selection of nouns for Spooky Mad Libs.

She knocks, and the startled “Gah!” through the door brings a small smile to her lips. “Uh,” Stiles says. “Yeah, Dad, come in.”

She does.

He’s half-turned away from her, frantically shoving . . . something . . . in a dresser drawer. He slams the drawer shut and spins around, then flails some more when he realizes that she’s not the Sheriff. He calms only when he spies the plate of food in her hand, and then he smirks, dropping into a chair. “Subtle, Dad. Real subtle.”

Lydia sets the plate down on his desk and raises an eyebrow. Stiles is wearing three layers of clothing, none of which hides the weight he’s lost over the past four weeks. “Maybe your father shouldn’t feel the need to try and deceive you into basic nourishment.”

“He shouldn’t. I’m totally eating,” Stiles says, ignoring the plate. “So, what’s up? Is everything okay?”

She doesn’t try to answer that. Instead, she sits down on his bed and glances at the bare walls around her. Even the posters have disappeared. She’s seen empty hospital rooms that have looked less stark. “I brought you something,” she says, and throws him the bag from the crafts store. “I don’t think you’re going to like it, but.” She hates this. “I need your help.”

“Of course,” Stiles says immediately. “Hey, Lydia, you know I’ll . . .”

He pulls the red string out of the bag and goes still. Even his leg, perpetually bouncing, becomes motionless and dead. His whole face is blank -- then, abruptly, he laughs. It’s an ugly sound, and she draws back from it.

“I don’t know if you noticed,” Stiles says, “but I didn’t do such a great job playing detective before. I couldn’t even figure out I was the bad guy. I couldn’t stop myself from -- ” 

He cuts himself off, turns away.

There are a lot of things Lydia could say to that. She could tell him that it wasn’t his fault, that he couldn’t have stopped the Nogitsune from taking control of his body. Or she could remind him that he absolutely _did_ figure it out, that even in a confused, sleepless state when he was losing small chunks of time, Stiles knew he’d been the one to write that message on the blackboard. It wasn’t his fault Scott didn’t believe him. Scott didn’t blame him. No one did.

“You were never the bad guy,” Lydia tells him instead. “Stiles. You weren’t -- ”

Stiles shoves the Bagel Bites off his desk.

Lydia shuts her mouth. There’s a long, awkward moment of silence, and she glances down at her 127 dollar sandals, now splattered with splotches of reheated pizza sauce. "Nice," she says.

He sighs. "Sorry."

He finds a washcloth for her shoes, dumps the uneaten food into the garbage can, and sits back at his desk. With one hand, he picks up the red string; with the other, he beats out a steady, unhappy rhythm into the side of his leg. “This is about the body in the playground, isn’t it?”

“There are going to be more of them,” Lydia says, nodding, because there will be, if no one stops this. It’s certain. She can feel the knowledge humming in her bones.

Stiles takes his time to look at her, and when he finally does, his eyes are wet. “Okay,” he says softly. His fingers clench around the string.

#

The dead kid’s name is Andy Stinson. Fifteen years old. Something of a problem child, messed up, truant, caught intoxicated in public more than once. The police found an empty bottle of his mother’s Xanax in his pocket. The police are ruling it a suicide.

Stiles puts a picture of the dead kid on his bedroom wall.

“Dad says Andy had a history of depression, or anyway, that he was on anti-depressants. But who isn’t, right? Hey, you still have those happy pills you used to take? I was thinking after we solve the case, maybe we could celebrate.” He waggles his eyebrows. “Go visit the mountain lions.”

Sometimes, even Lydia has no idea what Stiles is talking about. To compensate for this, she levels her very best unimpressed stare at him. He twitches a little under the weight of it and turns back around.

“It’s funny,” Stiles says, staring at the dead kid. “Andy was a little screwy, but I would never have pegged him for suicidal.” He laughs, the same abrupt, hollow sound that he keeps trying to pass off as normal, fooling no one. “But I guess you can’t know, right? What’s going on inside a person?”

The edges of his smile are bitter and mocking. Lydia remembers when he used to smile like a whole person.

But she backtracks over what he’s said, and the only conclusion she can come to is concerning. “You knew him,” Lydia says, because he obviously did, even though he said nothing about it at the playground, mere inches from the body. 

Stiles shrugs. “Not really,” he says. “We had art together. We had a mutual ‘we suck at this’ bro bond.”

“I’m sorry,” she says.

Stiles shrugs again, like finding dead friends is just something he does now, like he’s become desensitized to the whole process. Then again, maybe they all have. Stiles adds a post-it note next to Andy’s picture and writes on it: FUR ELISE, FOUND IN PARK, OD, SUICIDE? On a separate post-it, he writes: SPLASHING SOUNDS, DROWNING? and tacks it to the wall. He connects the pictures with red string. 

“Water doesn’t exactly give us much to go on,” Stiles says. “But if we look deeper into Andy’s life, find the connection to the Fur Elise, maybe . . . I don’t know. Maybe can figure out . . . something.”

He won’t say what they both already know, what she’s already pointed out before: you can’t discern a pattern from a single data point. She won’t be able to save the next victim, and almost certainly not the victim after that, either.

“We can try,” Stiles says quietly after a moment, even though Lydia hasn’t actually said anything. “That’s what Scott told me when . . . well, before. He said we can always try.” His fingers skirt the edge of Andy’s picture for a moment, and then he turns to look back at Lydia. “Speaking of which, how would you feel about breaking into Ms. Morell’s office again?”

She smiles. “Sounds like fun,” she says. “Just like old times, right?”

Stiles snorts. “Yeah, well, fair warning. Consequences of getting caught this time could include respiratory paralysis.”

#

It doesn’t prove very difficult, sneaking into the guidance counselor’s office. Fortunately, no one’s inside it this time, waiting for an appointment. Unfortunately, Coach Finstock wanders nearby, and Stiles is forced to go distract him while Lydia makes copies of Andy’s file. She isn’t sure exactly what kind of story Stiles is regaling their economics teacher with, but it seems to involve a disproportionate amount of arm waving. She suppresses the urge to smile and turns back to the filing cabinet.

Ms. Morell has a file on Stiles Stilinski, too.

He’s been seeing the counselor, she knows, since what happened with the Nogitsune. The school made it mandatory after his numerous disappearances, although she can’t imagine how helpful those sessions are, now that Stiles has told her what Ms. Morell’s plan B had been for him in Eichen House. She glances over her shoulder, where she can see Stiles still gesticulating wildly in the hallway, and turns back to the cabinet.

_These are private_ , Lydia thinks, even as she reaches for the file. As soon as she touches his name, something whispers across the back of her neck, a voice too quiet to be understood. She isn’t sure what that voice is trying to say, if it’s related to Andy, the Nogitsune, or something else entirely. It might not be anything at all but her own imagination.

She doesn’t read what’s inside, but she does make a copy, just in case.

#

Lydia meets Stiles at his house a few hours after school. Her homework is tragically simple, but she still needs to do it to maintain the GPA that will eventually get her into an Ivy League school far away from Beacon Hills. Stiles, meanwhile, has an appointment with the vice principal, which is what happens when you miss more school days than you actually attend. Lydia’s sympathy is limited.

They haven’t talked much about what they’re doing with the others. Stiles has told Scott, she’s sure, but Scott is busy helping Derek with the new Kate Argent situation, and Kira goes where Scott goes, and Allison is dead, and Aiden is dead, and Ethan is gone, and who even knows what Malia is doing these days. Scott is the Alpha, and he’ll come for his wolves when he’s called, but this . . . this is something different, this . . . case . . . they’re working on. Stiles would call it the ‘B’ plot, or the monster of the week. Lydia thinks of it as redemption. It’s something they need to earn for themselves, by themselves.

Aiden was looking for redemption, and he died for it. Maybe Andy was looking for redemption too. He was eleven years old when his youngest brother died, a seizure at the playground. He fell off the see-saw and hit his head.

Andy had been on watch.

“He dreamt of piano lessons,” Stiles says, reading through Ms. Morell’s handwritten notes. “Andy, I mean. His brother had just started taking them before he died.” He tosses the papers across the room to her and stares up at his newly cluttered wall. “I don’t know, Lydia. I mean, you get these warnings for a reason, I get that, but . . . maybe Andy really did just kill himself.”

“No,” Lydia says, shaking her head. “No, this is something else. See here? Ms. Morell says that Andy’s emotional state had been improving over the last six months. There’s no mention of suicidal ideation or past attempts anywhere in here. He was coming to terms with his guilt, Stiles.”

“Neat trick,” Stiles says dryly. “Maybe he could teach it to me someday -- oh right, he’s dead. Could be an issue.” He’s still staring at his wall, or through it. She wonders what he’s really seeing. That bitter smile is tugging at the corner of his lips again. “How does guilt make you feel, Lydia?”

Red. Pulled apart. It makes her feel like screaming, but it would only be a scream. It wouldn’t bring her friend back.

“Angry,” Lydia says. “How does it make you feel, Stiles?”

He closes his eyes, flops back on his bed. “Tired,” he says. “These days, it just makes me feel tired.”

#

She goes home and eats dinner with her mom, which is nice and simple and doesn’t include discussing guilt or dead bodies or even any of her father’s various shortcomings, one of her mother’s very favorite subjects. It’s a pleasant change of pace from Lydia’s evenings of late, and she enjoys it, right up until the point that she tries to staple the pages of her English paper together and finds that she’s somehow folded those pages into five white cranes without ever having noticed.

Lydia picks up one of the cranes and holds it up close to her ear. There’s something there, a weak, indistinct murmur . . . but she can’t make out what it’s whispering, and there’s no pressure building under her skin, no scream buried in the bottom of her lungs, desperate to break free. _It isn’t ready to talk yet_ , she thinks nonsensically, as if inanimate objects can ready themselves for anything.

But without a whisper, Lydia has little to go on -- the crane looks much the same as all the cranes she’d made as a child, when origami had been, if not a passion, then at least a hobby, something she did whenever she wasn’t secretly reading books about mathematics or beginning to learn Latin or ruling Beacon Hills Elementary with a sweet smile and a backhanded compliment. She’d learned origami in school -- her third grade class had read a particularly depressing book about a girl with leukemia who wanted to wish herself well with a thousand handmade cranes.

As a child, Lydia had never understood how a thousand pieces of folded paper could possibly grant you anything, much less cure you of a disease that attacked hundreds of thousands of people every year, but she had enjoyed the work, the precision of each and every fold. Other children, less skilled, made sloppy half-birds with their colored construction paper, but Lydia bested manual dexterity the way she bested everything else. Her cranes were simple, elegant . . . though never unconsciously formed. Not until now.

Lydia wonders how long it would take to make 995 more cranes. She wonders what she would wish for . . . but she doesn’t wonder for long because of course, of course she knows what she would wish for.

But the dead don’t come back to life, can’t crawl their way back to the living . . . and even when they can, it’s only the villains. 

In Beacon Hills, heroes never come back from the dead.

#

She dreams of Allison again. They leave school early -- Lydia wants to go shopping, but Allison drags her out to the woods instead. “Let’s shoot targets!” Allison says, as if this is a more enticing prospect than punishing her parents for their immaturity by buying offensively expensive shoes with their money.

She isn’t any good with a bow, not that this is particularly surprising. Her weapon of choice has never been a manmade thing, something wooden or metal that she could wield between her hands. Anyway, the woods have always been far outside her domain. The woods belong to scarier things, to the werewolves and the hunters.

“You’re selling yourself short again,” Allison says, chiding, not that she can legitimately chide anyone about anything while wearing that awful pilgrim dress. Clearly, the afterlife has not provided fashion tips. “Here. Like this.”

She steps directly behind Lydia, pressed up close, intimate, correcting her stance with fingers instead of words. Her hands slip down Lydia’s back, adjust her hips, hold her steady. Her ghost skin is solid and cool to the touch.

“Close your eyes,” Allison whispers, “and scream.”

So Lydia does. She screams for all she’s worth.

Her scream makes the moon rise. When Lydia opens her eyes again, it’s night, and she’s in the cemetery, standing right in front of Allison’s grave. The tombstone has cracked in half. Lydia’s arrow is still sticking out of it.

“You see?” Allison says, grinning. “You have power everywhere. The entire world is your domain. You are the queen over all creation.”

#

But when Lydia wakes up, when she gets dressed at four in the morning and finds herself at the school, she knows that Allison’s wrong.


	2. take your turn (in hopelessness)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please mind the tags for triggers.

Lydia lies on her stomach, feet kicked up in the air behind her. She idly weaves the green string between her fingers, wonders if they’ll ever actually have the opportunity to use it. She keeps the thought to herself, though -- she and Stiles take turns in hopelessness these days, and she had hers this morning when she found a high school senior at the bottom of the swimming pool.

At least Stiles is actually eating something today, even if it’s only a peanut butter cookie from the front office at school. Karen, the obnoxiously peppy secretary who works there, makes cookies almost every day, presumably to either cheer up students like Stiles who consistently have to visit the vice principal, or to do her part in aiding the youth of America in their ongoing quest for diabetes. In either case, Lydia doesn’t think it’s working for Stiles. 

Stiles, ignoring Lydia’s scrutiny with a minimum amount of twitching, puts the dead girl’s picture next to the post-it marked SPLASHING SOUNDS and crosses off the question mark after DROWNING.

Shailene Michaels. Eighteen years old, honors student, well on her way to becoming the valedictorian of her class. One of the best swimmers on the BHHS swim team, until approximately fourteen hours ago, when she attached weights to her ankles and jumped in the deep end.

“Remind me to never join the swim team,” Stiles says. “Only terrible things happen to swimmers here. Plus, who can actually rock a speedo?” He frowns. “Please don’t answer that.”

Truthfully, Lydia doesn’t think that anyone really pulls off the speedo very well . . . although Danny might do tolerably at it. Possibly Aiden, if he were still alive. Lydia doesn’t miss Aiden as much as she’d thought she might, but she does feel sorry for him, that he had to die for his shot at a second chance. She wishes she could’ve saved him, but her warning had come far too long after the fact. Death had surrounded everyone that night. Sometimes, she’s surprised anyone survived.

“You’re thinking about all the guys who rock speedos, aren’t you?” Stiles complains. He crosses his arms and glares at her. “Stop thinking about Derek, Lydia. Stop making _me_ think about Derek.” 

She opens her mouth, but he’s already moving on. “Let me see Ms. Morell’s notes again?”

Lydia pulls the folder out of her bag and hands it to him. He flips through it, scanning through the words they’ve already read -- stressed out, anxiety attacks, under an extreme amount of pressure from her father. Mr. Michaels teaches physics at Beacon Hills, and it’s well known that he’s a terrible teacher who enjoys humiliating his students; what Lydia didn’t know was that he’s also spent the last eighteen years blaming his daughter for her mother’s death.

Shailene had left a note by the pool. It said only, “I wish I hadn’t been born.”

Stiles sets the folder down with the angry, wounded smile she’s come to expect from him lately. “Dad says there wasn’t any sign of foul play at the scene,” he says. “The autopsy won’t happen for a couple of days, but . . . I don’t think anyone was there with her. She killed herself, Lydia.”

“Then she had help,” Lydia says. “Something’s doing this to them, Stiles.”

“Like at the motel,” Stiles says, nodding, and Lydia remembers Scott all too vividly, standing in the pool of gasoline with the lit road flare gripped tightly in one hand. Stiles had saved him, and she had saved Stiles, and that had made it a good day, followed by so, so many bad ones.

She and Stiles had saved Boyd that day. And not even a week later, he was dead.

“You think this is aconite poisoning?”

“Could be,” Stiles says, writing it down on a post-it note with a question mark. “Wolfsbane is fun for everyone, not just werewolves. Mere humans such as myself are also prone to fun-filled hallucinations about guilt and dead people.” GUILT and DEAD PEOPLE also make it on the post-it note, and then get underlined three times. “Maybe you can’t make a pattern from two dots in geometry, and maybe twice is only a coincidence in police work, but . . . you see the pattern emerging anyway, right?”

She does, unfortunately, and it’s not a pattern Lydia particularly likes. Andy Stinson and Shailene Michaels were opposites on paper -- different classes, different social groups, troubled kid versus academic superstar -- but they were both students at Beacon Hills struggling with guilt over their dead loved ones. And Lydia knows too many people such a pattern could apply to: herself, for one. Stiles, for another. Scott, too, and Malia, and even Derek, if current attendance at Beacon Hills isn’t actually a relevant factor.

There is so much guilt spread out between them. So many people laid to rest. 

“I’ve been making cranes,” Lydia says, instead of answering the question.

Stiles pauses. “Cranes?” he finally asks. “Like . . . third grade, ridiculously depressing book cranes?” And Lydia remembers, too late, that Stiles doesn’t like origami, has never liked origami, that he had cried in the middle of class trying to get the paper to fold right. Everyone had laughed at him, she remembers. They didn’t know about his mother. They didn’t know that, even then, he had more important things to wish for.

She wants to apologize for that . . . but somehow she knows that Stiles won’t take it well. Stiles won’t want her to understand why he’d really been crying in class.

“If I remember correctly,” Lydia says, sniffing, “your cranes were particularly atrocious.”

He scowls at her. “Not everyone got tapped by the arts and crafts fairy, Lydia.” He grabs a fresh pack of post-it notes out of his desk and writes CRANES on one. “You think this is connected to the next victim?”

“Yes,” Lydia says, without hesitation.

“Okay. Well . . . I don’t really know how to follow up on that, unless the next student is Japanese or something. But that seems like a pretty racist assumption, so let’s just forget I said it. I guess the best thing to do is make a list of students who are struggling with guilt. I suppose we could just _talk_ to Morell instead of always sneaking into her office.” He shudders at the thought. “Or . . . you know, I bet Hardigan’s got similar files in his office too.”

“You want to sneak into the vice principal’s office?”

“Could be a change of pace,” Stiles says. “And I’ve got _another_ appointment with him tomorrow, so I totally have an excuse to skulk around. No one will suspect a thing. I look totally innocent, see?” He gives her what he apparently thinks is an innocent looking smile. The only actual appropriate adjective for that smile is manic.

“Oh, yes,” Lydia says. “This is going to go _great_.”

#

Lydia ends up calling Kira that night because -- racist assumption or not -- she wants to make sure that their local kitsune isn’t feeling particularly suicidal these days. Kira assures her that she’s not, and also, she’s never tried her hand at origami in her entire life. Apparently, Kira went to an elementary school that decided not to traumatize its students with _Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes_.

They talk for a little while about things that don’t matter, but it’s difficult because Kira starts talking about Scott and then, very abruptly, stops talking about Scott, remembering who Allison was to both him and Lydia. The conversation becomes awkward, and Kira is clearly relieved when Lydia lies and says that she has to go eat dinner.

She can’t sleep that night. Every time she begins to drift off, a voice begins murmuring into her ear, a man’s voice she doesn’t recognize. It is, paradoxically, both gleeful and angry, and she can’t understand all the words. _If I have it_ , the voice says. _If I have it, I don’t share it._ A riddle, obviously . . . but there are too many possible answers.

_What is it?_ the voice asks, and when she can’t answer, it just starts screaming. _What is it? What is it? WHAT IS IT?_

Lydia puts her hands over ears and tries and tries to make it stop.

#

She almost doesn’t go to school the next day. She’s shaky, exhausted, and just . . . done. She doesn’t want to take turns being hopeless anymore. She wants to let her hopelessness consume her. She wants to just . . . sleep. Sleep and forget the last few years even happened.

She has . . . how did Stiles refer to them? Her bottle of happy pills? She could take a few, maybe just one over the recommended dosage, and let herself melt. Drug herself into deafness. Fade and fade away.

Lydia stares at herself in the mirror. She’s almost as pale as Stiles, and there are bags under her eyes. She looks defeated.

(She isn’t.)

She grabs her darkest red lipstick and applies it carefully. Then she rifles through her eyeshadow until she finds a deep purple -- it will look nice against the shirt she just bought last weekend. Black eyeliner on both her lower and upper lids, and thick black lashes, just slightly curled.

It’s not the look she’s known for – in fact, it’s skirting awfully close to goth -- but that’s okay, maybe even better. She’s not the same girl she once was -- she’s seen too much, lost too much. She should look like a new Lydia. She shouldn’t hide under soft curls and spring colors.

She isn’t defeated. She might lose, but she won’t forfeit. She won’t surrender because Allison. Allison never surrendered.

Lydia owes it to Allison to keep going. So she does.

#

Stiles meets Lydia at her locker. He’s just come from the vice principal’s office -- she can tell because he still has half of a peanut butter cookie shoved in his mouth. He grins around the cookie, but it’s tired, a poor man’s imitation of an actual smile, and she wonders if he knows what a bad job he’s doing at pretending that he’s all right. Lydia’s been trying to wait for him, the way he waits for her, but she’s not sure how much longer she can stand aside and pretend he doesn’t need help from someone.

“Got the list,” Stiles says triumphantly and hands her a piece of paper with names A-M. “It’s kind of depressingly long, so I figured we’d split it in half, try to do some research on our own.”

Lydia agrees. She scans the list of names, and isn’t surprised to see Scott’s name there, or her own. Stiles smiles apologetically at her. 

“By the way,” he says, “my dad wants to do this, like, whole family night thing.” He rolls his eyes, trying to look annoyed instead of just uncomfortable and anxious. He does a predictably terrible job at it. “I think Dad’s planning to chain me to the radiator if I don’t, you know . . .” 

Stiles shrugs his shoulders, which could really mean anything from ‘eat’ to ‘sleep’ to ‘talk about what’s going on inside my head’. “So, maybe no house calls tonight? Unless it’s an emergency, of course.”

“Sure,” Lydia says, and hesitates before reaching out and touching Stiles on his too-skinny arm. “You should spend time with your dad, Stiles. He . . . he worries, you know. He loves you a lot.”

Stiles swallows and can’t meet her eyes. “Yeah,” he says. “I know.”

#

After school, she plans to go to the library. Her mother has been home, feverish and miserable, since yesterday, and if Lydia goes there now, she’ll only be stuck playing nursemaid . . . which would make her a good daughter but a terrible banshee and/or detective. Which is why she’s confused to find herself driving home. She didn’t mean to get into the car. Why is she in the car?

Only her mom . . . but she can’t be . . . she can’t be, she _can’t be_ . . .

She’s not. Mom is on the couch, watching soap operas and looking generally pathetic, so Lydia runs up to her bedroom, which is covered in paper cranes.

She must have made them last night, after finally giving up on sleep. She doesn’t even remember doing it, but here there are, at least fifty of them.

They’re whispering. No. _One_ of them is whispering.

She can’t hear what it’s saying, and she can’t scream without frightening her mother, so Lydia drops to her knees and picks up each crane one by one. She puts it to her ear. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Noth -- wait.

_If I share it,_ the crane says. _If I share it, I don’t have it_.

The riddle from last night. No. The second _half_ of the riddle from last night.

If I have it, I don’t share it. If I share it, I don’t have it.

What is it?

What is it?

What is it?

“A secret,” Lydia whispers.

She carefully unfolds the crane, reads Ms. Morell’s elegant handwriting:

_Trouble sleeping. Somnambulism. Persistent feelings of guilt, coupled with a fixation on preventing a repeat occurrence of the traumatic event. Growing obsession with riddles, beginning to manifest as a daily ritual to alleviate anxiety. Recurrent panic attacks, most often triggered either by nightmares or by encountering a riddle he cannot immediately answer_.

His voice through the door, talking to someone, someone in his head. _A hole . . . a coffin . . . a shadow . . . a secret_ . . .

“Stiles,” Lydia says, and drops the unfolded, once-crane to the floor.

#

He won’t (or can’t) pick up his phone. Lydia takes a moment to breathe, and then dumps her backpack out on the bed and fills it with her perfectly folded cranes. She doesn’t think about why she’s doing this. She can’t doubt her instincts, not this time. If she second-guesses herself, Stiles is dead. She knows this. She knows this in the place deep inside where her screams begin.

Lydia runs out the door, past her vaguely bewildered mother, and breaks all the speed limits in her car. It takes her less than seven minutes to get to Stiles’s house.

The front door is ajar.

Her throat squeezes tight, but she pushes past it, slamming the door hard enough that it bounces back into the wall as she walks through. “Stiles? Stiles!”

She doesn’t see Stiles. She sees the Sheriff, standing in the doorway of his son’s bedroom. One hand is covering his eyes, the other gripping the doorframe like it’s the only thing holding him up. Lydia comes to a halt, staring at him, because she isn’t too late, she isn’t, she can’t be.

She covers her mouth because she refuses, absolutely _refuses_ , to scream. Screaming means that Stiles is dead, and he’s not dead, he’s not, he’s _not_ \--

The Sheriff finally looks up at her, and she rushes past him into the room.

Stiles isn’t dead. Stiles isn’t there.

The room is empty but for hundreds of poorly made paper cranes littering the floor.

#

Lydia steps carefully around the cranes, slowly turning in a circle, examining the room.

Stiles has added more evidence to his wall. A lot more evidence, but she zeroes in on the most damning piece immediately, his own picture, right next to Shailene and Andy. _He knew_ , Lydia realizes, while something deep inside her chest fractures. _He knew what was happening to him, that he was the next target_.

There’s red string connecting him to the dead kids. There’s also red string connecting the three of them to another picture -- Karen, the secretary at the front desk office. It’s a small picture, black and white -- Stiles must have cut it out of his last yearbook. ‘Another Freaking Darach’ is written at the top of the post-it next to her face, but then crossed out, replaced with ‘WANNABE Darach.’ He’s also crossed off the question mark after ‘aconite poisoning’ and added a few extra details: poisoned over length of time, minimal levels means gradual symptoms, method of delivery – PB Cookies.’

It seems like the most ridiculous thing. Lydia wants to laugh, but when she turns around, there’s a bag of Karen’s peanut butter cookies on his desk. Also, just beside it, a letter.

“Read it,” the Sheriff says from the doorway. His voice is rough, and his cheeks red as he scrubs his hands over his face once more. “The first part is addressed to you.”

Lydia picks up the letter with shaking hands. His fingers must have been shaky too. The handwriting is atrocious, even for Stiles. Sloppy letters, all tumbling forward, running into one another.

_Lydia_ ,

_Look, I know you’re going to be pissed, and I get that, and I’m sorry. I know how much you wanted to save the next one -- but you’re gonna save the one after that, okay? You’re gonna save all the ones after that. Cause you were right, Lydia. I did figure it out -- check out the wall, if you haven’t already. Karen’s a fucking dabbler. She has half her rituals mixed up. I’d be embarrassed for her if she hadn’t already killed two kids. Anyway, I stole the cookies so she couldn’t poison anyone else, not today, at least. Only the peanut butter ones have the magic, hallucinogenic ingredient -- she pushes those on the kids with Issues. Maybe Dad can use them as evidence. I’ll write him about that_. 

_Lydia, I just -- don’t beat yourself up, okay, if you don’t find me. I know you’re going to come looking, no matter what I say, but I hope it’s too late. I hope I’m long gone by the time you read this. I don’t want you to find me. We can’t go back, but it’s more than that. I’m not safe anymore, I don’t think, and I know, I know you’re gonna think it’s all the wolfsbane, but it’s not, I swear it’s not. It’s gonna come back, and I can’t be the reason, I can’t be the hand that kills anyone else. I shouldn’t even be here. I never deserved to be here_.

_You just -- you keep going, Lydia Martin. You are the most amazing girl. You’re gonna change the whole world, you’ll see_.

_Dad_ ,

Lydia stops reading. That section is for the Sheriff and the next for Scott, and she doesn’t have any right to read those words. (Though she picks up a few anyway; without meaning to, she sees _better off without me_ and _if it wasn’t for me_ and _you’re going to be okay_ and _Dad, don’t you dare eat . . ._.) Her hands are shaking harder now, and she carefully sets the letter down, wipes her eyes, and looks back at the wall.

Stiles is smiling, in the picture he chose. It’s a year or two old, back when she wouldn’t give him the time of day. His hair was so short, she remembers. It seems like such a long time ago now.

There are photos underneath his picture, all linked with red string. Allison, holding a bow. Aiden, looking away at something. The deputy, whose name Lydia doesn’t know, the one who died in the bomb explosion -- Stiles must have gotten his picture online. There’s a newspaper article about the attack at the hospital, and a post-it note with the names of everyone who died there. There’s an older photo, too, slightly separated from the others. Her skin is pale, her eyes almost amber. There’s no post-it note next to her face, but of course Lydia knows who she is.

He looks so much like her. He must see shades of her in the mirror every day.

“Is it too late?” the Sheriff asks slowly, like he’s literally pushing the words out of his mouth. “Is he -- ”

“No,” Lydia says. Her voice isn’t controlled, isn’t anywhere near calm, but it’s certain at least. “I’d know if he was.” 

_I’d be screaming_.

The Sheriff takes a long breath that almost becomes a sob before squaring his shoulders. “Then we have to find him,” he says. “I keep a gun in a lockbox, not my service weapon. Stiles, he . . . the gun is gone.” The Sheriff’s fists curl, short nails digging into his palm. The gesture is familiar; she’s seen his son do it often enough. “I have to go to the station, put out a BOLO on his car. You -- ”

“I’ll stay here,” Lydia says. There’s no room for argument in her voice, not even with the Sheriff. She won’t be any help at the station or canvassing the streets. “Call Scott, Derek. Let them know what’s going on. Tell them about Karen. She might not be an actual Druid, but that doesn’t mean she isn’t dangerous. It might not be a matter for the police.”

She watches the Sheriff try to digest that, what that likely means for Karen’s longevity. “And you . . .”

“I have to investigate in my own way,” Lydia says. She’s sure he’s remembering the empty basement at Eichen House, how she failed him and Stiles before, but it’s different now. She’s different. She will succeed at this because she has to. “I won’t waste your time,” she promises him. “I won’t call you until I’m sure.” 

The Sheriff studies her and then abruptly pulls her into a hug. He’s crying again. She is, too.

“We’ll find him,” the Sheriff says, and then he’s gone, and she’s left alone with only the whispers and cranes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I just want to be honest from here: I did absolutely zero research on aconite poisoning. Hopefully, no one minds too much. :)
> 
> Also, Lydia's darker makeup -- and a lot of the inspiration for this story -- came from this image in "The Divine Move." I would totally watch a spinoff where Stiles and Lydia are goth detectives. http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-bd_vtPnL4Fk/UzgaMgwumhI/AAAAAAAACZw/pRwcbELymBY/s1600/teen+wolf.jpg


	3. walk with me (through hell)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings: those tags above? Still definitely apply in this chapter. Also, there's a brief but somewhat detailed description of the decomposition process.

She walks up to the wall, plucks the red string with her index finger. It only whispers riddles she’s already heard. _What is it, what is it, WHAT IS IT_?

She glances back down at the cranes.

There aren’t actually a thousand of them. She isn’t sure how many, although basic geometry and a lifetime of winning ‘How Many Skittles Are in This Jar’ games puts her estimate at around three to four hundred. His skill at origami has improved only slightly with time -- possibly due to a lack of focus, or maybe Stiles, too, wasn’t fully aware of what he was doing when he was doing it. She wonders what he was wishing for, or if he even knew.

Lydia grabs her bag and upends it over the carpet. Her beautiful cranes meet his sloppy ones like old friends. They’re whispering now, all of them whispering, and so much louder than the night before, but she still can’t quite make out the words. It’s so close. It’s so close now.

Everything inside of her is humming, thrumming, vibrating, _building_ . . .

Lydia opens her mouth and screams.

There’s so much power, too much. Still screaming, she drops to her knees, and lower, her elbows pressed into the carpet, her lips almost kissing the floor. The release of her breath, the force of her voice, it lifts the cranes up, up in the air. They hover until the scream is done with her, until she can finally fall silent, and then the cranes float gently back to the ground.

And there is no sound, no sound in the whole world, but Allison’s voice whispering into Lydia’s ear.

#

She won’t call the Sheriff yet, not until she’s seen Stiles with her own eyes. Not until she’s sure. (Even though she is sure. It doesn’t matter that she was wrong before -- she knows where he is, or at least where he’s going. She even has an idea how to stop him, although it’s not one of her favorite ideas, and she desperately wishes she had a better plan B. Almost any other plan B, really.)

She calls Derek. He picks up on the first ring, already growling. 

“We can’t track his scent,” Derek says, because time is limited, and because Derek isn’t the kind of person who wastes time with pleasantries or basic hellos. “He’s using some kind of chemical to mask it. He must have driven all over town.” Derek sounds pissed, which is how he sounds basically all of the time. People who don’t know him wouldn’t hear the worry under all that anger. Lydia knows him.

For her part, Lydia’s relieved. She isn’t surprised Stiles found a way to mask his scent -- even half out of his mind, he’s too smart to let something like that trip him up -- and any time he’s wasted driving around town means more time for her to catch up to him. “I have a lead,” Lydia says. “I think I know where he went, and I think I know how to stop him . . . but there’s a small chance he went somewhere else instead. I need you and Scott to go there. Call me if you see him. Otherwise, talk to the Sheriff. He might need your help taking down the Darach.” She smiles slightly, imagining Stiles’s outrage. “The wannabe Darach.”

“Where do you want us to go?”

Lydia closes her eyes. “Allison’s grave.”

“Okay,” Derek says. He doesn’t hesitate around cemeteries, or death in general. This is perhaps not surprising for a man who temporarily camped out in the burnt remains of his family’s home before moving on to an abandoned subway car. “Where are you goi -- ”

She hangs up on him. (Even Derek would probably object to her Plan B.)

She only needs two things, and then she’s gone, driving back to a place she’d thought she’d never return to. Back to Oak Creek.

#

He’s not where Allison actually died. It’s probably where he wanted to go, but Stiles doesn’t know the actual spot. He didn’t regain consciousness until long after, until Kira and her mother carried him to their car and drove away. He never saw the body.

Lydia saw the body. Lydia went to the Sheriff’s office with Isaac and Scott. _It all happened so fast_ , they’d said, lying. Lying, but not.

One second she had a best friend, and then . . .

And then . . .

Stiles is in the tunnel, right where she thought he’d be, right where he’d collapsed in her arms. His knees are drawn up close to his chest, and he has a gun in his hand. It’s not really pointed at anything, not yet.

“I knew you’d find me,” he says as she steps forward. “But I wish you hadn’t. I don’t want you to see this.”

“Then maybe you shouldn’t do it,” Lydia says, and that’s the wrong approach, she knows. There’s too much anger in her voice, so much barely suppressed fury. _Death doesn’t happen to you, Lydia. It happens to everyone around you, to all the people left standing around at your funeral, trying to figure out how they’re going to live the rest of their lives now without you in it_. It’s like he’s forgotten it all. Like he’s chosen to forget.

She can’t let him.

He isn’t looking at her. His eyes are focused on something else, something to the left, only there’s nothing there. “He keeps finding me,” Stiles says, his voice hushed, frightened. “I thought I’d shut the door for good. I thought I barricaded the fucker, but . . . he keeps finding me.”

“Stiles, there’s no one -- ”

“Oliver could see him,” Stiles says. Lydia has no idea who Oliver is -- there are too many things she doesn’t know, too many things she should’ve made him tell her. “But that’s because the Nogitsune got in somehow, through a fly or something. He swallowed a bug.” 

Stiles laughs a little, and then abruptly turns towards her, his eyes wide, panicking. “You can’t see him, right? He didn’t get inside you, not you. Tell me you can’t see him, Lydia.”

“I can’t see him,” Lydia says, evenly as she can, “because he isn’t here. It’s the aconite, Stiles, remember? The cookies?” 

She slides her backpack off her shoulder and opens it, taking out the bag of poisoned baked goods. “This isn’t you. This is someone inside your head telling you to do this, remember? You figured it out.” She’s trying not to cry, failing. “Stiles, you’re the one who always figures it out.”

Lydia wants, more than anything, to believe that Stiles figured it out too late -- that the wolfsbane already had its claws in him, that it and it alone is the reason he’s here with the gun. She wants to believe there wasn’t a choice, that he didn’t deliberately poison himself, or let himself be poisoned. She doesn’t know what she believes. “Was it the cranes?’ she asks. “When I told you about them yesterday? Is that when you knew what . . . what was happening to you?”

Stiles nods, but he looks confused. It’s hard to know exactly how lucid he is right now. Calculating but also hallucinating -- rational and yet irrational. “I wanted to tell you,” he says. “I wanted to, but Allison. Allison told me not to.”

That hurts, more than it should, more than Lydia wants to admit. “How long have been you seeing Allison?” she asks. Her voice isn’t steady at all.

“I don’t . . .” Stiles runs his hands through his hair, never letting go of the gun. It presses into the side of his skull like it’s trying to squeeze through his skin. “Not long? Not very long. But I dream, I dream, and she’s . . .” His gaze flickers back to the left, and his breathing picks up, short gasps, far too fast. “Lydia, you have to go. You have to go right now.”

“No.” Lydia steps towards him. “He can’t hurt me. Stiles, he isn’t _here_.”

Stiles points the gun at her.

She almost laughs. “Don’t be an idiot,” she says, continuing towards him. “You’re not going to kill me.”

“Yeah,” Stiles says. “Yeah.”

He points the gun at his own head.

She stops.

He lets his head fall back against the tunnel wall. The barrel of the gun rests loosely against his temple. “I thought maybe I could move past it,” he says. His words are starting to slur with exhaustion. “Y’know? When you came to my house with that damn bag of red string, I thought maybe we could do this, we could save people, like, like the Winchester brothers, or, I don’t know, like the Hardy Boys, if they dealt with more supernatural shit. I thought maybe I could make up for the people I killed. _I_ killed,” he repeats, when Lydia opens her mouth to protest. “It’s on me, I know it is. I didn’t fight hard enough. I let him in.”

“You don’t think you fought _hard_ enough?” she asks, aghast.

He doesn’t seem to notice. “Someone else would have stopped him,” Stiles mumbles, almost to himself. “But I couldn’t, I can’t, and now he’s back, Lydia. He’s back, and I don’t know what riddle I missed, but I messed up, I messed up bad, and he’s gonna kill you, he’ll kill everyone, we’ll kill everyone. That’s what we do. I can’t. I can’t. If I kill myself, he can’t get in. That’s what Allison says.”

He’s not quite looking at Lydia, more over her shoulder. She tries not to shudder. There isn’t anyone there. She knows that, better than most. “Can you see Allison right now?” Lydia asks.

Stiles nods.

“Well, you tell that bitch no one cares what she thinks.”

Stiles jerks, like someone tugged on his strings. “But -- ”

“That’s not Allison, Stiles. Allison would never say those things. Even if she believed them, she wouldn’t say them. Allison didn’t give up. You know that. I know you do.”

“If I hadn’t -- ”

Lydia exhales. Her exasperation makes it almost a growl, but she’s a banshee, not a werewolf. “God, Stiles! You think you’re the only one with guilt? Allison didn’t die to save _you_. She didn’t die rescuing _you_.”

Stiles blinks at her. “It’s not your fault,” he says.

“I told you. I’ll believe that when you do.”

But he can’t believe it. She can see that in his face, in how he looks at the gun, like it’s a lifeline instead of a death sentence. She can’t talk him out of this, not the way he is right now, not without an advantage on her side. She only has one.

It’s time for Plan B.

Lydia glances at the peanut butter cookie, still in her hand, and takes a bite.

Stiles practically spasms, and the gun in his hand swings around dangerously. “What the hell are you doing? Lydia -- ”

She sniffs. “Well, it’s not as dramatic as a road flare and gasoline, I’ll admit, but it should do the trick nicely enough.” She takes another bite, making a face as the cookie crumbles unpleasantly in her mouth. She hates to waste the calories on something that’s already gone a little stale.

“Lydia -- ”

“Everyone’s been poisoned over a series of days, am I right? That’s what your post-it said. The symptoms were so gradual, the victims didn’t notice right away. Maybe a flicker at the corner of their vision, a slow buildup of anxiety, of dread. They thought they were just having an off day, maybe. The spiral into depression, the full-on hallucinations, that came later, several visits to the vice principal’s office later. If I ate one of these a day . . . but I just don’t have that kind of time.”

She finishes her cookie and pulls out another. “Thankfully, there are a lot of these left. I bet if I just kept eating them, one right after the other, it wouldn’t take long to see the effects.” She briefly closes her eyes again. “I think I’d like to see Allison, too.”

Stiles fidgets, almost rocking back and forth like a child, a child with a loaded gun. “No,” he says. “You don’t -- you don’t want -- ”

“I’ll see Allison,” Lydia says, “and after you’re dead, I’ll just take the gun out of your hand, and, well.” She puts her finger in her mouth, mimes pulling the trigger.

Stiles jumps. “You can’t. Lydia, you can’t. Please, you -- ”

“I can,” Lydia says calmly, “although statistically, you’re right. Women are far less likely than men to kill themselves with handguns. Still, it happens. It can happen today. And I know what you’re thinking, a pretty girl like me, pristine, put together . . . but I don’t care what my body looks like. We’re both too smart for that, aren’t we? A corpse is a corpse, whether it’s beautiful or not, and it won’t stay beautiful for very long, will it?”

“Lydia -- ”

“Rigor mortis sets in after about three hours, algor mortis after 24. I’ll grow cool, then cold, rigid, then relaxed. My flesh will begin to bloat. Patches of my skin might turn green. The smell will get pretty bad, you know. And insects, of course. Maggots, in particular, form en masse -- ” 

“Stop it,” Stiles says, and his whole body is shaking now, the gun lowered but still clenched tightly between his fingers. “Stop it, stop. Not you, not _you_ , not -- ”

“Why not me?” Lydia demands. She finishes another cookie, moves on to the next one. “If I’d left Allison a better warning, if I’d fought harder to escape . . . maybe she’d be alive right now. No, she would be alive. I know that. If Allison had just let me die . . . but she didn’t, and I’m here, and I’m trying to figure out how I’m supposed to live the rest of my life without her in it. You want me to live without you too? You want Scott to live in that world? You want your dad?” 

Stiles makes a sound at the back of his throat, a low whine that reminds her of kicked puppies . . . but he isn’t a werewolf, either, and she ignores it. “It’s not fair,” she says. “It isn’t. If you get to surrender, why don’t I?”

“You won’t do it,” Stiles says. He’s trying to sound certain, authoritative, but she can hear the doubt in his voice, see it in his trembling fingers. “You won’t. You won’t? Lydia, tell me, tell me you won’t.”

She raises an eyebrow at him and bites into another cookie.

He buries his face in his hands. The side of the gun is smashed against his cheek.

She starts walking towards him again. He half tries to push himself up, but he’s too exhausted to run anymore, and anyway, there’s nowhere else to go. She gently kicks his feet apart and kneels between them.

“You don’t care about getting hurt,” she says. “But you know how I’ll feel? Stiles, tell me how I’ll feel.” 

He can’t say it, keeps shaking his head. “I’ll be devastated,” Lydia tells him. “And if you die? I’ll go out of my freaking mind. You see, death doesn’t happen to you, Stiles. It happens to everyone around you. It happened to Allison. It happened to Aiden. And we owe it to them to keep going.”

His hands are still covering his face, so she grips his wrists gently and tugs them down. 

“We don’t get to surrender,” Lydia says. “We owe them that, at least.”

Stiles closes his eyes. “If you’re going through hell,” he murmurs, and then smiles a little, biting his lip so hard it starts to bleed. “If you’re going through hell, keep going.”

Lydia knows that quote. “Churchill,” she says.

“Hell of a guy.”

“Stiles.” She waits until he opens his eyes, until he finally, finally looks at her. “I will drag you with me, Stiles Stilinski. If I have to, that’s exactly what I’ll do. I will drag you straight through hell, but I’d rather you walked with me.” 

She leans forward and kisses him on the forehead. He shudders against her. “Give me the gun,” she says.

He stares at her for a long time. Finally, he hands it to her. She throws it over her shoulder without even looking, and he starts to weep. He howls.

She holds him, clings to him every bit as desperately as he clings to her. She can hear a whisper further down the tunnel. It’s Allison’s voice.

_Lydia_.

She only lets go of Stiles long enough to dig the lighter out of her bag. He knows why she has it as soon as he lays eyes on it. “Does that . . . does that even work on humans?” he asks. “I was never real clear about that.”

She isn’t actually sure herself. “I guess we’ll find out,” she says.

_Lydia, please_.

Lydia’s hands shake. Allison is right behind her now. If she just turns around . . .

“Don’t look,” Stiles says. “Don’t look, Lydia.” He holds his hand out. “Together?”

_Lydia_!

Lydia nods. She doesn’t turn around.

She touches his palm with the flame, and then closes her own hand around his.


	4. all this (colored) string, I will untangle

The rest of the day is a bit of a fog.

Lydia remembers calling the Sheriff. She remembers saying, “I found him,” and she remembers the Sheriff crying, and suddenly the Sheriff is there, holding onto Stiles like he never plans to let go. Scott’s mom is there, too, holding two fingers to Lydia’s neck. She’s very pretty. Lydia’s never really noticed before.

At some point, the Sheriff does let go of Stiles -- because he’s hugging Lydia now, murmuring gratitude into her hair. His tears are wet on the side of her face. She doesn’t mind so much.

Then they’re at the Sheriff’s house, and she has no memory of leaving the tunnels or the drive away from Oak Creek. She vaguely remembers the other police officers, but she has no idea what the Sheriff says to them. She has no idea how he explains any of this. She can barely explain it to herself. 

Lydia is sitting on the couch. Stiles is slumped beside her, and Scott is crouched by his side, speaking quietly to his best friend. Every word out of his mouth seems to be an apology or a reassurance.

Derek’s saying something about Karen. She’s dead, Lydia realizes. She forces herself to pay attention, finds out that Karen tried to take a fire axe to Scott, of all things. Lydia asks how Karen died, and Derek smiles, all teeth.

The Sheriff is definitely going to have his work cut out for him, the next few days.

Lydia . . . fades. She’s not exactly sure for how long. She doesn’t know why she feels like this, so disconnected from everything around her. It might be a symptom of the aconite poisoning. She should know all the symptoms, but she just can’t remember, which is unlike her. Other possibilities: shock, exhaustion. She’s been awake for too many hours. She needs her beauty sleep.

Melissa makes her drink a glass of water. Lydia complies, but she’s not at all convinced that a combination of hydrogen and oxygen is going to fix this.

Stiles also has a glass of water. He’s not really drinking it. His eyes are only half-open, and she’s pretty sure that he’s only a few seconds from passing out. But then the Sheriff starts yelling at him, pacing around the room, all his relief suddenly, horribly transformed into angerguiltfear. Stiles whispers that it wasn’t him, that it was all the wolfsbane, that he didn’t mean to . . . but Lydia doesn’t think Stiles even knows if that’s true anymore. He isn’t okay. Neither of them are.

Everyone starts talking at once. Someone says antidepressants. Someone says no more of this supernatural crap. Someone says Eichen House, and Stiles starts to panic. It’s bad enough that Lydia thinks she might have to kiss him again, just so he can hold his breath. Instead, she grabs his burned hand with her own, squeezing it enough that they both wince.

“Guidance counselor,” she says, knowing he’ll fill in the rest, knowing that antidepressants won’t mean much without therapy, and therapy won’t mean much if his therapist doesn’t know what monsters are out there, lurking in the dark. Knowing that Eichen House is a terrible place that can’t help him, that it can only cause him harm. Knowing that Stiles can’t let go of the supernatural crap anymore than she can. He’s not a banshee, not a werewolf, not even a nogitsune anymore. He’s only a human, but he’s also pack, and he’s gone too far to turn back now.

There’s no going back. Not for him, not for any of them.

“You too,” Stiles whispers.

She blinks at him. “What -- ”

“Guidance counselor. You too.”

“Stiles, I don’t -- ”

“I’ll drag you if I have to,” Stiles says, and he’s smiling at her. The smile is little and broken, crumbling at the corners, but it’s not bitter at least. It’s not angry at all. “I’ll drag you, Lydia Martin, but I’d rather . . . I’d rather you walked with me.”

And, well. There’s not very much she can say to that.

#

She doesn’t have to like it, though.

“How are you feeling today, Lydia?”

Lydia stares at Ms. Morell coolly. “Irritated,” she says. “What would you recommend for that? Meditation? Pancuronium bromide?”

“Talking,” Ms. Morell says, not discomfited in the slightest. “What do you feel is the source of your irritation?” Clearly expecting the answer to be _you_.

But Lydia does not bow to expectation, not to anyone, not anymore.

“Allison,” she says. “If a death omen tells you not to go after her, then maybe you shouldn’t _go after her_. It’s not exactly astronautics.”

Ms. Morell inclines her head. “Rocket science,” she says. “That’s very clever.”

Lydia smiles sweetly at her, because that’s always how she’s preferred to bare her teeth, by not actually baring them at all. “I’m gifted,” she says.

“You certainly are,” Ms. Morell agrees. “But you don’t think you’re worthy of being saved?”

“I’m tired of being saved,” Lydia says, smiling tighter. “I’ve decided to be the one doing the saving from now on.”

Ms. Morell nods. “That’s noble,” she says, “and I wouldn’t try to dissuade you from such an ambition, knowing the range of your . . . gifts.”

“Great -- ”

“But I would caution on two points.” She holds up a finger. “One, everyone needs to be saved sometimes, and that’s not a sign of weakness, simply a fact of life. And two, we can’t always save everyone.”

Lydia lifts her chin. “We can always try,” she says. “Consider that _my_ way of maintaining the balance. I think you’ll find that it’s significantly less fatal than yours.”

Ms. Morell leans back in her seat. “If you’re waiting for an apology, Lydia, you aren’t going to get one. I will always do what I have to in order to save lives, even if that means sacrificing the life of an innocent boy, and your friend. But Stiles isn’t a danger now, not to anyone but himself, and I want to help him, just like I want to help all my students, just like I want to help you.” Ms. Morell loosely clasps her hands together. “Do you believe that?”

Lydia considers it.

“Yes,” she says finally.

“Good. Then -- ”

“But I don’t think you want it enough,” Lydia says, and Ms. Morell closes her mouth. “You tried to help Stiles at Eichen House, I believe that, but killing him was always your plan B. That’s not good enough, not for the McCall pack, certainly not enough for me. We saved Stiles without pumping him full of amphetamines _or_ paralyzing his lungs, and that only proves to me that you don’t think enough outside the box. You are always on damage control. Your moves are not divine. Also, your judgment is highly suspect -- the Alpha pack? Really? Sweetheart, your allegiance to those psychopaths makes as much sense as that blouse.”

Ms. Morell’s eyes betray her as they glance down at the blouse, however briefly. Lydia lets her smile widen a bit and continues.

“Now, maybe you can help Stiles with his guilt. You can even try and help me with mine, and I’ll cooperate, I will. I’ll tell you all about my dreams, or whatever it is you want to hear. But the students at this school are _mine_ to protect, and if I hear even a _rumor_ that you’re planning to sacrifice one of them to your precious balance, well. I don’t think you’ll enjoy the dialogue we’ll engage in then.”

Ms. Morell leans forward again, smiling tightly at her. “I believe we understand each other,” she says.

“Excellent.”

The counselor inclines her head. “Now then," she says. "You mentioned dreams. How have you been sleeping these days, Lydia?”

Lydia remembers playing hide-n-seek in the graveyard with Allison last night. No matter what tombstone Allison hid behind, Lydia could always find her. No matter where she went, Lydia knew she’d make it there herself one day, far, far in the future, when she was ready.

“Better,” Lydia says. “I’ve been sleeping better.”

#

She goes to Stiles’s house after school. The Sheriff gives her Tostino’s Pizza Rolls this time.

“Eat them,” Lydia says, dumping the plate on the desk in front of Stiles. “Or I’ll have Derek come over and lurk at you until you do.”

“I kind of miss Stalker Derek,” Stiles says nostalgically, reaching for one of the pizza rolls. “Seems like it’s been forever since he crawled through my window in blood-stained clothing. Good times.” He finishes the roll and grabs another one, unprompted. Lydia suspects that this has less to do with Stiles’s appetite actually improving and more to do with trying to prove that he’s totally okay now, that his dad doesn’t need to worry anymore. Like that’s something that’s ever going to happen again.

Lydia glances around the room. Stiles has taken all the pictures and post-its down, leaving his room as barren and depressing as it had been two weeks ago. The cranes are gone too, she realizes.

He notices her noticing. “Tossed them,” he says. “They were pretty crappy anyway.”

They were, so she doesn’t argue with him. Instead, she thinks about a little boy in the back of class, angrily folding pieces of paper and trying so hard not to cry. “I thought . . . I thought you hated origami,” she says.

Stiles snorts. “I do,” he says. “It is boring as hell. There is not enough Adderall in the world to make that shit interesting.” He glances down at his hands. “I used to sleepwalk a lot, when I was a kid. I guess I wasn’t exactly sleepwalking when he . . . when the Nogitsune took over . . . but now that he’s gone, I’ve started doing it again. Made myself a sandwich once. Tried to watch some TV. But mostly, mostly I’ve been making cranes in my sleep. Scared the hell out of me, first time it happened.”

“Sounds like your subconscious wants to make a wish.”

Stiles doesn’t say anything to that. Lydia glances back at the bare walls. “Do you still have your string?” she asks him.

Stiles groans and thumps his head into the desk. Three times, because once clearly just isn’t dramatic enough for him. “Again? I thought we’d get at least a _week_ off before another creepy, horrible thing happened.” Despite this, he opens a drawer and pulls out the knot of red string. He tosses it to her.

She tosses it back. “Wrong color,” she says.

Stiles fidgets. Or, really, he fidgets more, since his leg was already shaking up and down like crazy. Now his fingers drum against the desk too, tapping an unsteady, anxious beat. “Well, if you wanna be technical about it, yeah, but -- ”

“You figured it out,” Lydia says. “And I stopped you from being an idiot. The werewolves might have offered an assist, but this was our case, and we saved lives together. I think that’s pretty clearly a win, don’t you?” She reaches out her hand again, waiting, and Stiles fidgets for another full minute before finally throwing her the green string. 

She walks back to his bed, kneels on top of the covers. “It seemed a little creepy,” she says, “to permanently keep pictures of monsters and psychopathic faculty members where you sleep. So maybe we can record our victories by the people we saved instead.” She pulls a photo out of her purse and tacks it against the wall, then encircles the picture with a double loop of green string. She hears Stiles get up from the desk, feels his breath on the back of her neck as he looks over her shoulder.

Allison took the picture. It happened last summer, after Gerard but before Jennifer, after Matt but before the Nemeton. Jackson had just left for London, and things were still awkward between Allison and Scott, but Stiles came over to Lydia’s place anyway, intent on cheering her up with a series of spectacularly failed headstands. In the picture, Stiles is already half-falling and grinning anyway, and Lydia’s standing to the side, trying to give him her very best unimpressed eyebrow. The soft, upward curve of her lips betray her amusement, and more than amusement. Fondness. Gratitude.

“You saved me, Lydia, ” Stiles says, and she’s not surprised to hear that his voice is a little hoarse. “I didn’t save you.”

She keeps her eyes on the picture. “Of course you did,” she says. “You gave me the gun.”

“You wouldn’t have done it,” Stiles says. He’s still trying to sound certain, still failing at it. “It was just a bluff, wasn’t it?”

But Lydia doesn’t know the answer to that, anymore than Stiles knows how willingly he let himself sink down the rabbit hole.

“I miss her,” Lydia says instead. “She was my best friend.” She takes a breath and then finally turns around to look at Stiles. He isn’t crying, exactly, but his eyes look a little wet. Hers are too. “I’d make a thousand cranes if it would bring her back, but there’s nothing that can do that. Not even me, not this time.”

Stiles swallows. “I don’t know what I was wishing for,” he says. “Even now, I don’t . . . I want to go back, but I can’t. We can’t. We can’t fix that.” His eyes roam over the wall, land back on their picture. “More green string than red, maybe. That doesn’t . . . it doesn’t seem like so much to ask for.”

He laughs again, shaking his head a little. “Too bad I trashed all my shitty cranes already. Must have had, like, 400 of those things.”

She considers him thoughtfully for a minute, and then slides off the bed, grabbing a pair of scissors and a few pieces of computer paper. She sits back down on the mattress and folds the top corner of her paper down. He sits down next to her, silently, and she offers another unfolded piece to him.

“So let’s begin again,” Lydia says. “Okay?”

Stiles looks at her, then the paper. With trembling hands, he begins to fold.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading!


End file.
